contribution to the meeting on trauma and performance at the biennale of theatre and psychiatry in padua 12 october 2006

Thank you for your invitation and the opportunity of talking about our work.

Our WAR STORIES project is an exploration of war and theatre. We have created international partnerships with companies in Algeria (Masrah El Tedj), Serbia (Bazaart), Palestine (Theatre For Everybody), Kosovo (CCTD) and Italy (Il Torchio). We have an association with the Sibiu International Theatre Festival in Romania. Partnership and working internationally are essential to our project.

In England we have partnerships with the University of Manchester Drama Department's IN PLACE OF WAR project and the National Association of Youth Theatres. In our current development project we are working with York Theatre Royal Youth Theatre, Theatre Venture, Riverside Studios Young Bloods, the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art Alumni Network and Riverside Studios. We have also worked with groups of psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists in the UK and our partner countries.

I work as a theatre director and a writer. My work is centred on Az Theatre. I also work for the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, the London Film School and The Actors Centre. I work freelance so, for example, I have recently completed a commission for a new play based on the Orpheus myth for a major regional theatre in Bulgaria and have just directed a new musical theatre piece for the Islington Music Forum presented at the Sadler's Wells Lillian Baylis Theatre in London. This involved 60 mental health service users as performers and was called SARDINES - The MUSICAL.

The seeds of the WAR STORIES project were laid at the end of the last century with an aspiration to bring together actors from different continents to make a collective piece of work. After running workshops with international artists in London and Sibiu we eventually brought together the core companies if the project in Sibiu in 2002. We have since then created a series of encounters and productions in London and elsewhere, notably in Belgrade in 2004.

In 2005 our activities were focused on a collaboration with the United Nations Office of Missing Persons and Forensics in Kosovo where we created , in partnership with CCTD two phases of a project working with the communities of the missing.

This year we have conducted a development project focused on the issue of recovery, working with artists, young people and 'therapists and activists' in Turkey, Algeria, Kosovo, Italy and England. Our plans to work in Palestine have been forestalled by the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip where our Palestinian partners are based. We are organising an event in London at which we will have a 7 hour long video link with Gaza so that our companies and communities can share our creative work. This development project is being supported by the European Cultural Foundation, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Roberto Cimetta Fund and the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.

From the outset the WAR STORIES project was based on certain key principles. One was that war should be viewed as capable of being abolished. We considered this to be a crucial perspective from which to view the human behaviour which constituted this historical phenomenon. Human beings had lived for millions of years without war and would do so again. We made a distinction between violent aggressive behaviour and the cultivation, validation and organisation of these human tendencies in economic and political structures. What allowed us this perspective was the globalisation of human relations in the post-soviet communist period. What impelled it was the recognition of the power of human technology evident in the development of nuclear power. This principle was formulated before September 2001 and it is due to what might be described as the collective trauma this event and subsequent events have produced that this perspective has become obscured.

Another complementary principle was that in order to explore war we need to explore our selves. Moreover if we were to explore theatre as well as war then we had to seek ways of connecting our feelings to the behaviour, passions and attitudes which constituted the basis of war making. It didn't seem satisfactory to simply look at war objectively as if it was happening 'over there'. The project was being launched at a time of considerable upheaval. The war in former Yugoslavia raised questions about from where war 'broke out'. Also new relationships of complicity and responsibility emerged during the attack on Serbia by NATO. We recognised that war was somehow inside us. This illuminated the sense that we had of Europe and the rich world having 'exported' war . Later we got used to the surprising formulation that there were 'war producing' and 'war receiving' countries. It was this that impelled us to create partnerships that went beyond Europe.

We developed a workshop format which proposed that everybody had a war story and also that, at some point, this human activity had had a transforming impact on everybody's life. We used exercises to identify these moments of change and to embody them within the theatre space. We then used exercises which explored the distance that the key moment in any personal story was from the centre of the theatre of war. We described this centre as being like an actualised paranoia where all relationships are reduced to friend/enemy or killer/killed. Our work was concerned with investigating how these 'actualisations' spread throughout the social space which surrounded the theatre of war and enforced a kind of splitting between and within individuals so that we identified ourselves as being 'for' or 'against' in relation to a given war. This was also true of the anti-war movement.
All stories were equally valid no matter how far or near they were to the 'action' or the combat location. Since all stories were created and embodied within the human dimensional space of the workshop they all had a palpable and expressive equality.
So this second principle led us by its logic to see how people could recognise their experience, their responsibility and the connection between different stories from different wars. By making embodiments of their own stories they could activate their relationship to war-making processes. We considered actors to be carriers of stories. As a workshop participant could locate the physical roots of their story within themselves and begin to act it out they became actors. At the same time they gave a historical dimension to their story.

There were a number of impulses behind the latest phase of our work. One was a response to the re-invasion of the Palestinian West Bank in Easter 2002. We made a piece of work called Palestine Verbatim that was an attempt to create a public portrait of this event. What was striking was the way the Israeli soldiers treated the homes of the Palestinians. There was such evidence of primordial degrading violence that the damage to the victims and the perpetrators must have been profound. Another event was the breakdown of social relations and the chaos caused by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 where evidence of similar degradations emerged. Iraq was suffering a collective trauma. How were people to survive and recover their humanity in these circumstances?

In 2004 our work in Belgrade included, among many stories, that of a young girl who, when the first air raid warnings were sounded there in 1999, could think of nothing else but the safety of her little sister. She had no thought of her own survival but, terrified and in agony, she rushed around her neighbourhood in search of the little girl. She found her playing with dolls in a courtyard near their home unaware of any danger.

Later that year we presented a series of short plays in London as a part of our WAR STORIES project. I had become deeply interested in the short play form and imagined a 'sutra' of short plays as an form that could articulate the diversity of experiences that our project held. One of the plays we presented was written in Japan in the 14th century by the founding genius of the Noh Theatre, Motokiyo Zeami. In this play a warrior, who has become a monk because of his killing of a young man in battle, returns to the spot where the event took place. He encounters the ghost of the young warrior and realises that their souls are bound together for all eternity. This extraordinary dramatic dance of the killer and the killed with its strong tones of redemption and recovery was presented alongside contemporary work by English and Iraqi authors.

I began researching the question of recovery from war, violence and conflict. I asked a number of therapeutic practitioners what images and stories they had of the therapeutic process. I read as extensively as I could. I learned that the situation of the trauma sufferer could be described as the collapse of their internal space. This involved a loss of a capacity for a pluralistic response to experience and the reduction of the world to rigid 'either/or', 'for/against', 'black/white' structures of feeling and thought. This was connected to our earlier observations about the actualised paranoia at the centre of the war situation. Soldiers returning from war and their inability to return to civilian life were the prime and primary examples of the stress produced by trauma. Looking at fundamentalism and terrorism as responses to trauma seemed to open up an ability to think about these questions at a social macrocosmic level. Here I am, of course, not talking only about islamic society. The same reduction - the collapsing of internal space, the loss of multidimensionality - also seemed to be true of the fundamentalist frame of mind with its intense literalism (abiding absolutely by the word of the book) that is associated with an obsessive preoccupation with the power of the father.

I was reminded of the suggestion of internal mobility in the story of the girl during the bombing raid in Belgrade. The human capacity for compassion and seeing oneself in the other - a human skill so intimately connected to that of acting - seemed to be also connected in some deep sense with a feminine capability. I was also struck by the appeals, made by the mothers of the children of the Beslan school siege, that they wished the hostage takers to take them instead of their children. During this work I was strongly reminded of the story of Alcestis in Euripides' play and decided to use this text as an organising principle in this latest phase of our project.

At this point Az Theatre was approached by the United Nations Office of Missing Persons and Forensics in Kosovo. They had heard about our work and had looked at our internet site. The work that I was about to undertake with them brought me closer to looking at the traumatic nature of war for victims and perpetrators and to coming to terms with the relationship between individual and collective recovery.

The overall stated objective of the Memory Project initiated by the Office of Missing Persons and Forensics was to 'de-victimise the victim'. In their dealings with the families of the missing the leading thinkers there had seen that people were locked in to their role as victims so much that all experience was assimilated and interpreted according to this self perception. It was evident that this victim mentality was an expression of the stress which followed traumatic loss. The families of the missing are living at the sharp edge of the consequences of war. Their difficulty is that they are unable to grieve and to mourn. They are constantly trapped by anger and blame. The effect of this experience on all the social and psychological structures is significant. Because of the strength of this experience there was a generalised culture of victimhood throughout the society. This offered the perfect basis for future perpetration and could be commanded and organised with ease by political and military structures.

We worked in both phases of the theatre project there with separate companies of artists, Albanian and Serbian. In the second phase we were able to work much more closely with the families of the missing and the presentations took the form of forums at which the theatre elements were fluently connected to the audiences own story telling. The dramatic work was surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, based on the audiences own experiences. The simple and primitive activity of seeing the familiar represented in an artistic form gave a very powerful sense of recognition and knowing. Accounts from the audiences confirm that this experience validated and, at the same time, released them from the grip of their own experience. It opened up a distance between themselves and what they had been through. It is very difficult to measure the success of this work.

We have called the latest phase of our work WAR STORIES: Alcestis, stories of recovery and dialogues with death. It has a new workshop format which starts from a series of exercises based on breathing and the puppet-like manipulation of the bodies of other participants. These exercises themselves hold images of recovery processes. Each participant is asked to engage with their own story of recovery. They are asked to create a tableau image of the state or situation before recovery through an image-making exercise which flows out of the preceding puppet-like body manipulation exercises,. They are then asked to transform the elements of this image into an image of the state or situation after recovery.

In some sessions we are able to work on the movement between these two images. One way in which this can take place is to create a danced version of this movement with a rhythmic accompaniment. This may yield only an impressionistic version of the story that lies in the narrative space which separates the two images. In other instances the story is broken down into episodes and a template is offered which may provide a series of suggestions. This template is based on what I have extracted as basic mythic pattern from the Alcestis. The movement from splitting to denial, to anger and blame, to the recognition of loss and grief, a dialogue with death, to redemption and recovery, may seem familiar because it accords in some respects to the therapeutic story as it has been told by a number of therapeutic practitioners.

This is a search for embodiments of the human capacity to survive, to recover and gain wholeness. Our proposition is that by making contact with your own story you are able to relate actively to the story of the other. Of course the stories that are worked on in the rich West are different from those encountered in societies with a closer experience of war. The images of war, chaos and violence are televised constantly. How are we to deal with the terrorising, numbing and aneasthetising effect of this information? How can we find an active responsive relationship which doesn't simply reproduce the trauma in a negative form? We are proposing a participatory theatre. I am grateful to be able to say that our practice is not unique.

The images and accounts of this work are being collected in an interactive internet space. Like most internet spaces it is in the process of development. We have the main instructions in English, Italian, French, Albanian and soon in Arabic. We have used video extensively in this work and this material will soon appear on the site. We have been concerned to create a collective space which is internationally accessible. Once again our emphasis is on participation.

The next phase of our project will be to create performances from our research. We plan to make this available internationally.

What have we discovered so far during this phase? We are focusing on trauma and we have considered the nature of post traumatic stress disorder. Can I shed any light on your deliberations?

Our work is about therapy but we do not have a therapeutic mission. We do not deliberately seek to work with people who have mental health problems or who suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. We have been advised closely by drama therapists but I have no training or background in this set of skills. We want to continue to work closely with therapists.

In the rich West it is easier to talk about recovery. Our culture is more accessible to the ideas and practices of psychology. After the events of September 11th 2001 a call line was opened to provide psychotherapeutic counselling to help people affected by the attacks. It was called Project Liberty. In a fairly short space of time in the New York State area 600,000 people had telephoned expressing a need some kind of help. In Kosovo and Algeria issue of recovery has not been perceived in the way it has in the rich West, except by members of the psychotherapeutic community. Is it possible to say that they are more 'collectivist' societies. They may be less individualised. The constitution of the human individual differs in relation to the collective. The societies are significantly more agrarian and the extended family is stronger. People will go through extremely painful and humiliating experiences and recover if they perceive the necessity of what they have suffered. If they have won freedom and justice the damage is mitigated. Of course there are still mental health problems which derive from experiences violence and war or at least are unleashed by these events. There are still issues of retribution and revenge where justice has fallen short. The history of the civil war in Algeria is instructive in this respect.

All of this forms a background to our understanding of the particular disorder under discussion. Perhaps the reasons for the slower emergence of this disorder in Italy can be found here. It is a complex of disorders with a variety of symptoms. I have observations to make but they are not based on clinical experience.

Our societies are disintegrating so it is hardly surprising that human individuals are doing so as well. One factor in the therapeutic process which can guide sufferers back to integrity and health lies in the ability to open up a living connection between our imaginative childlike capacity and our adult capacity to engage effectively with the reality of which we are a part. In my view theatre work is wonderfully effective in this precise respect.

I have given you a description of the development of our project, our practice and some of the general thinking that lies behind our work. Sometimes I think that the reason why Dionysus is associated with theatre is that it is a double god with one ear turned towards the minute inner workings of the human soul and the other turned outwards towards the enormity of cosmic or geological or at least historical time. As they say in England, I am all ears.

Thank you.

Jonathan Chadwick